NATIONAL FABRIC, SOCIALIST TAPESTRY: CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND THE WEAVING OF THE NATIONAL CHARACTER IN THE SOVIET BORDERLANDS, 1934-1991

Abstract

This work seeks to explore the implementation of the Soviet nationalities policy in the sphere ofliterature in a number of non-Slavic ethno-national territorial entities of the Soviet Union, including Georgia, Armenia, and Karelia. The seven decades of Soviet rule in these borderland territories coincided with the period when ethno-territorially oriented nation-making enterprises crystallized all across Eurasia. In the Soviet totalitarian context, the modern national identity of the titular nations of ethnically delineated territorial entities was ethno-linguistically based and territorially bound. Furthermore, the Soviet national cultures of the titular peoples of these five ethno-territorial entities across the Soviet empire took shape under the official doctrine of “national in form, Socialist in content.” The class-based, ideologically rooted, regime-dictated dictums gave rise to the officially instigated promotion of national literary achievements and epic figures as repositories of the national character of Soviet nations. The celebration of these folk literary works and poets was vividly manifested through high-profile conferences, publications, monuments in urban spaces, national literary festivals, and, most importantly, grandiose jubilees. On the surface, such efforts disseminated the above-mentioned Soviet nations’ specific cultural and literary traditions across the vast, multiethnic Soviet empire. Underneath such instrumentalization of the pre-Soviet national literary heritage, nonetheless, was a rather sinister and monotonous political agenda laden with ideological impingements and pro-regime messages. In this study, I will look at the Soviet policy regarding the national cultures in the non-Slavic borderlands through the prism of classical literature and its implications for the Soviet nation-building projects unfolding across the Soviet Union’s ethnic borderlands. The Soviet monumentalization of national epics and other historical achievements in literature presented a more accessible and less rigorous form of ideological indoctrination. Disguised in the form of classical literature, this ideologically oriented program of cultural engineering not only promoted values on a broad-based participatory platform across the Soviet public through education and other forms of mass indoctrination but also helped to strengthen conceptions of national character amongst the peoples inhabiting the non-Slavic borderlands. I conclude this segment with a brief overview of the chapters to underscore the importance of the national epic (or the national epic figure–creator or main hero) as a crucial component in the Soviet palimpsest of the national character of the ethno-territorially bound Soviet nation.